Precision agriculture is a plant management technique that uses observations and measurements to identify and respond to intra-field variability of vegetation. Conventionally, visually based observations are often from aerial or satellite photography that generate vegetation maps, hopefully with reasonable latency to provide up-to-date feedback. One such visual based observation is a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) imaging, which is often used to generate NDVI maps. NDVI maps have been found to successfully identify live vegetation.
Live green plants absorb solar radiation in the photosynthetically active radiation spectrum (e.g., the “red edge” around 700 nm) to support photosynthesis. Correspondingly, the structure of vegetation also tends to reflect near-infrared light since absorbing this spectrum would cause a plant to overheat. Accordingly, live green vegetation tends to image dark at the red edge around 700 nm while imaging bright in the near-IR band. The NDVI uses a ratio of near infrared (IR) light to red edge light to generate images that distinguish vegetation from non-vegetation. However, these images have conventionally been acquired from above using expensive aerial or satellite photography.